THE MOTIVATIONAL IMPACT OF TEMPORAL FOCUS: Thinking About the Future and the Past

1996 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 593-620 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Karniol ◽  
Michael Ross
Keyword(s):  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Temporal Focus

Temporal Focus

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abbie J. Shipp
Keyword(s):  
Well Being ◽  
Psychology Research ◽  
The Past ◽  
Research Areas ◽  
The Future ◽  
Behavior Based ◽  
The Individual ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
Temporal Focus

Temporal focus is the individual tendency to characteristically think more or less about the past, present, and future. Although originally rooted in early work from psychology, research on temporal focus has been steadily growing in a number of research areas, particularly since Zimbardo and Boyd’s (1999) influential article on the topic. This chapter will review temporal focus research from the past to the present, including how temporal focus has been conceptualized and measured, and which correlates and outcomes have been tested in terms of well-being and behavior. Based on this review, an agenda for research is created to direct temporal focus research in the future.

scholarly journals Culture, Temporal Focus, and Values of the Past and the Future

2012 ◽  
Vol 38 (8) ◽  
pp. 1030-1040 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tieyuan Guo ◽  
Li-Jun Ji ◽  
Roy Spina ◽  
Zhiyong Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Differences ◽  
Cultural Influences ◽  
Future Event ◽  
Asymmetry Effect ◽  
Past Event ◽  
Monetary Value ◽  
The Past ◽  
Chinese Canadians ◽  
The Future ◽  
Temporal Focus

This article examines cultural differences in how people value future and past events. Throughout four studies, the authors found that European Canadians attached more monetary value to an event in the future than to an identical event in the past, whereas Chinese and Chinese Canadians placed more monetary value to a past event than to an identical future event. The authors also showed that temporal focus—thinking about the past or future—explained cultural influences on the temporal value asymmetry effect. Specifically, when induced to think about and focus on the future, Chinese valued the future more than the past, just like Euro-Canadians; when induced to think about and focus on the past, Euro-Canadians valued the past more than the future, just like Chinese.

Time will tell: Temporal landmarks influence metaphorical associations between space and time

2018 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 677-701 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heng Li ◽  
Yu Cao
Keyword(s):  
Individual Differences ◽  
Chinese Spring ◽  
Space Time ◽  
Fresh Start ◽  
The Past ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
Mapping Experiment ◽  
Spring Festival ◽  
The Future ◽  
Temporal Focus

AbstractAccording to the Temporal Focus Hypothesis (TFH), people’s implicit spatial conceptions are shaped by their temporal focus. Whereas previous studies have demonstrated that people’s cultural or individual differences related to certain temporal focus may influence their spatializations of time, we focus on temporal landmarks as potential additional influences on people’s space-time mappings. In Experiment 1, we investigated how personally-related events influence students’ conceptions of time. The results showed that student examinees were more likely to think about time according to the past-in-front mapping, and student registrants, future-in-front mapping. Experiment 2 explored the influence of calendar markers and found that participants tested on the Chinese Spring Festival, a symbol of a fresh start, tended to conceptualize the future as in front of them, while those tested on the Tomb Sweeping Day, an opportunity to remember the ancestors, showed the reversed pattern. In Experiment 3, two scenarios representing past or future landmarks correspondingly were presented to participants. We found that past-focused/future -focused scenarios caused an increase in the rate of past-in-front/future-in-front responses respectively. Taken together, the results from these three studies suggest that people’s conceptions of time may vary according to temporal landmarks, which can be explained by the TFH.

Uncommon Futures

2019 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 243-260 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Valentine ◽  
Amelia Hassoun
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Open Future ◽  
Quarter Century ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Temporal Focus

In the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, Munn (1992) argued that anthropology had neglected the future as a temporal focus. This concern continues to be echoed by anthropologists, even as a review of post–Cold War anthropology reveals that the future has become a recurrent, dominant temporality in the field. Reviewing texts from the past quarter-century that provide a diagnostic at the intersection of the anthropology of futurity and the future of anthropology, we argue that the urgency for an anthropology of the future—and concern over its neglect—presumes some continuity prior to the challenges of an uncertain “now” under constant transformation and, simultaneously, a desire for a common and open future world. Deriving this insight from the work of Black and Indigenous scholars, we suggest that an anthropology attuned to futures is most fruitful when it foregrounds decolonizing perspectives on commonality, continuity, and openness and problematizes them as the implicit grounds of anthropological futurity.

scholarly journals Ghosts of the Past and Dreams of the Future

2011 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 397-410 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Rabinovich ◽  
Thomas A. Morton
Keyword(s):  
Group Identification ◽  
Experimental Studies ◽  
Self Esteem ◽  
The Past ◽  
Negative Appraisal ◽  
The Future ◽  
Group Members ◽  
Individual Self ◽  
Temporal Focus ◽  
The Impact

The authors investigated the impact of temporal focus on group members’ responses to contextual ingroup devaluation. Four experimental studies demonstrated that following an induction of negative ingroup evaluation, participants primed with a past temporal focus reported behavioral intentions more consistent with this negative appraisal than participants primed with a future temporal focus. This effect was apparent only when a negative (but not a positive) evaluation was induced, and only among highly identified group members. Importantly, the interplay between temporal focus and group identification on relevant intentions was mediated by individual self-esteem, suggesting that focus on the future may be conducive to separating negative ingroup appraisals from individual self-evaluations. Taken together, the findings suggest that high identifiers’ responses to ingroup evaluations may be predicated on their temporal focus: A focus on the past may lock such individuals within their group’s history, whereas a vision of the future may open up opportunities for change.

Infrahumanization and Mental Travel: Effects of Temporal Orientation on Perceived Humanness

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 97-104
Author(s):  
Mohammad Malik
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Mental Time Travel ◽  
Temporal Orientation ◽  
Emotional Experiences ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Future Events ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
Temporal Focus ◽  
Significant Direct Effect

According to the self-centric future hypothesis, mental simulations of future events, future-oriented mental time-travel may incorporate mental representations of the self. This experiment tests the self-centric future hypothesis in the context of infrahumanization. Mental simulations with current self-knowledge are constructed when people think of the future, which may influence the level of humanness they would attribute to strangers. It was predicted that participants in a future-oriented mindset, given their self-centric mental representation of the future, would be less likely than participants in a past-oriented mindset to infrahumanize strangers. There was not a significant direct effect of temporal focus on perceived humanness found. Effects of temporal focus on level of rated humanness were moderated by valence of emotional experiences attributed to others, such that the hypothesis was supported for negatively valenced emotional experiences only. Perceived humanness ratings were significantly higher in the future-oriented than in the past-oriented condition for negatively valenced indicators.

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